The other day a friend of ours stopped by for dinner. Since he was passing through (indirectly) on his way back to Australia he didn't want too much luggage and so decided to leave us a book he'd just read.

Back in 1989 I was lent a book by a different friend who said, "You must read this, it's great". That was a Friday and I sat down to read it in the evening. Stopping only for sleep and some food I read the book from cover to cover in one go, all 680-odd pages of it. What book was this? It was The Eight by Katherine Neville. A mystery revolving around the game of chess it soon became one of my favorite books of all time. The author has written a couple of books since them but none of them (in my opinion) lived up to her first book.

Imagine my surprise the other evening when I'm handed a book by my friend called The Fire, written by Katherine Neville and a sequel to The Eight. To make things even better it's a pre-publication copy and it won't be available generally until the middle of October.

My first thought was to sit down tonight and re-read The Eight from cover to cover and then start on The Fire. Nineteen years later things are a bit different and I suspect that my two year old son is not going to be too amenable to letting Daddy sit around and read a book all weekend. Still, it'll be great to see if the original is still the way I remember it (it's been a few years since I last read it) and how good the sequel is.